Drewbot • The Good Kind of Control

The Good Kind of Control

One can’t read Isaacson’s Steve Jobs without thinking about focus, a demand for control, and the costs and benefits of each.

Isaacson examines (clumsily) how Job’s focus produced massive success while causing him to abandon basic social graces. His refusal to compromise in pursuit of a product made everything else disposable, including people. Discovering a tray-loading CD-ROM drive in place of a slot-loading mechanism caused him to throw a tantrum, burst into tears, and nearly postpone the launch of the initial iMac. Aesthetically he was in the right, but there’s little question his fantastical devotion to product visions caused him to make life difficult for many friends, family, and coworkers.

To product revolutionary products or art does one need to be a control freak? And if so, is it possible to manage that control in a way that it doesn’t cause pain?

With these thoughts fresh in my mind I was struck by something Michael Stipe said in an excellent Salon interview published today. Leave it to Peter Buck to provide an example of moral control:

R.E.M. has always been very deliberate about what you do and what you don’t do.

Mostly about what we don’t do.

Well, this is a band that stood up to record labels about producers before you even had an album, a band that had a distinct visual identity from the beginning, a band with the instinct to split all the songwriting credits equally.

You could call it the Peter Buck school of how not to fuck up and fuck over your closest friends.

I’d attend that school in a heartbeat.